The Steel Princess

Chapter 18: Beneath Alien Stars

Skye hardly slept that night, and was up with the dawn to find Josselyn still on duty. "What are you doing here?" she asked, pulling her nightshirt over her head.

"It's Auda's day off," Josselyn explained, ringing the bell to summon breakfast. "She's going fishing."

"Fishing?" That was almost hilarious enough to make up for her sleepless night. What an extraordinary range of talents that woman had. "What about you? What do you do on your days off?"

Josselyn hesitated a moment, then vanished into the anteroom and came back with a book. Not just any book, either - the one he'd taken from her father's desk. "Your Highness. Skye. There's somewhere in Celiande I'd like you to see."

"And it's related to that book?"

"Yes."

"Then lead on."

Skye finished dressing, and they wolfed down a hasty breakfast; Josselyn had stopped being self-conscious about eating on duty, after she'd chastised him for letting his rumbling stomach wake her in the middle of the night. When they were done, they went down through the Granite Keep and out onto the rain-washed streets of the city.

The sky was a pale, flawless blue; the air smelled of fresh hay and ripe fruit and damp stone. Nearby, woodsmoke was rising, and someone was frying bacon. There were other, less palatable smells, of course, but Skye had spent a lifetime filtering them out, and she could almost imagine she was out past the Eastering Woods, at some isolated farmstead, miles from anywhere.

Miles from the castle and the Council, ambassadors and ministers and suitors. It was a pleasant dream.

Josselyn walked at her side, for once, rather than three steps behind, and he seemed quite at home on the city streets. "How long have you lived in Celiande?" she asked.

"Four years, on and off," he replied. "Auda and I came from Shenland to train with our parents when I was sixteen and she was fourteen. We've spent time at a few ducal estates in the hinterlands, but otherwise we've been here."

That made the pair younger than Skye had realised; she found herself a little bit jealous at what they'd accomplished, even if they must have spent most of their childhood separated from their parents. "How are you so good at fighting? You haven't even been training as long as I have."

"At the castle, no. We've been handling swords since we were old enough to walk, though. And trying to use them on one another, mostly."

Skye grimaced, remembering childhood squabbles with her own siblings all too well. At least they hadn't been armed. "I bet you were both a menace. Auda especially."

Josselyn laughed, a sound that made Skye's heart flutter for reasons she couldn't put a name to. "I was worse, actually, but we looked so alike that Auda sometimes got the blame. She grew faster than I did. For a while, even our own mother couldn't tell us apart."

The thought of the pair as children made Skye happier than it probably should have, so she forced away her smile and concentrated on where they were going. The route Josselyn had chosen snaked along the foot of the hill that housed the Halls of the Dead, heading south and east.

"Where are we actually going?" she asked finally, curiosity getting the better of her, as they crossed a bridge over a rocky gully. There was very little at this end of Celiande, as far as Skye could recall; the workshops of embalmers and coffin-builders, a rather putrid-smelling candle-maker's shop, and the remains of what had once been a sanctuary. It was here Josselyn stopped, in front of little more than a circular jumble of broken walls and tumbled pillars, abandoned when the far grander sanctuary had been built at the other end of the city.